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Owned and operated by Fritz and Sara Swanson since 2005, Manchester Press is a printer and publisher of stationery, art and artistic collaborations. The press is located on Main Street in the village of Manchester, Michigan.

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Many students in my essay writing class, and my creative writing class, have asked me for a summer reading list that fits in with the stuff we have been reading in class. Below are several of my favorite books, along with some notes. I will likely add to this list over time, so this is the first draft composed as of April 17th 2016.

This collection of essays from DFW includes “getting away from already pretty much being away from it all” which is standard in my 325 course pack. I think Wallace was at his very best in his non-fiction, where we get to see his sensitive and precise mind intersect with the concrete world. The title essay, about him taking a cruise, is harrowing and funny. But all the more potent because we know that after writing the essay, he grew more and more sad because of how cruel-ly he portrayed some of the other people on the trip.

This is Wallace’s final novel, published after his death. He spent the last decade of his life working on it. He sought to write a book about boredom, and set his novel in an IRS processing facility in Illinois in the early 1980s, before returns were processed electronically. The book is largely composed of three long set-piece narratives that work sort of like novellas, each about a different employee of the IRS, but those are interwoven with a huge number of short sections, either about those same characters, about other IRS employees, or in some occasions intrusions from a fictionalized version of Wallace. I would classify this as a MUST READ.

This is the last book-length work that DFW published while alive. It is a history of transfinite math, and the source for my views on the importance of Zeno’s Paradox to understanding DFW. I read this book in panic.

The thing to understand about these three books by Salinger is that they are actually his second novel, in disguise. He wrote The Catcher in the Rye to wide acclaim in the early 50s, but he had already started on this book when he came back from WWII. The first of the nine stories is “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” that was published in 1948. In it, we meet a character named Seymour Glass. What we learn in “Zooey” (a novella that serves as the second half of FRANNY AND ZOOEY) is that Seymour’s younger brother Buddy Glass is the ostensible author of all these texts. With that fact we can see that all nine stories, and the four novellas are meant to be read as a unit whose conclusion, HAPWORTH 16, 1924 remains unavailable. The “novena” (my mentor Reg McKnight coined that term for a novel made of disconnected short stories and other material) follows the Glass Family, a family of New York entertainers. All of the children (Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, Zooey and Franny) were on a radio show in the 1920s and 30s called IT’S A WISE CHILD. When they grew up they were, of course, kind of messed up.

Like Salinger, I think it is important to take these books by Robinson as a unit. In 1980, Robinson wrote HOUSEKEEPING and was basically declared a genius. It was a book entirely about women, daughters mothers aunts and sisters, who all come back to an old family house on the prairie and try to make sense of their lives. Specifically, two sisters are taken in by elderly aunts after they lose their mother, then a crazy homeless aunt steps in… it’s a book about landscape as much as it is about characters. What I found heartbreaking was the feeling, at the end, that the sisters were fading into the forests that surrounded the house, and it was as though they were becoming spirits. I felt at the time that it was the most intrinsically pagan book I had ever read. (In the pagan sense of Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America.)

But then, after the book tore up the world, Robinson vanished. Which is to say, she retired to a life of teaching, wrote occasional essays (like, about theology and nuclear energy, for example) and didn’t write another word of fiction as far as anyone knew. Until 2006, when she came out with GILEAD. Which is all about MEN, fathers sons grandfathers uncles brothers. Specifically, it is about a pastor, John Ames, who has had a son very late in life (when he was 70). The book is written as a letter to the seven year old son because the now 77 year old pastor is dying of a heart condition. It’s about John Ames’ life (and about the life of his father John Ames, and his grandfather John Ames) but it is also about God, the church and how to be truly good in this world. It is the single most Christian book I have ever read (beating CS Lewis, for example, by a country mile). In fact, I think it may be one of the only authentic expressions of American Christianity that I have ever read. There are some books after Gilead set on the same town that I have not read. I prefer to see these two books which sit on either side of this generational silence as a powerful pair, like the moon and the sun.

Maxwell’s amazing collection of tales! “The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing” is regularly in my 223 syllabus, and it makes me cry every time I teach it, and read it, and probably even when I think about it.

These are narrative non-fiction essays based on Sack’s own clinical experience as a neurologist. The title essay for example is about a man with a brain injury that prevents him from making sense of people’s faces, and as a result he can’t distinguish heads from hats. It’s a heartbreaking piece of science writing.

Calvino was one of the avant garde in the 1970s. This collection of short stories is, in some sense incomparable. There are stories set in Italy, in the primordial ooze, and in the infinitely hot dot of energy that preceded the Big Bang. There are stories that teach you about Semiotics.

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Letterpress printing has been dying for more than a century. This year, we are celebrating (approximately) the 120th birthday of the nostalgia for traditional printing. It was in 1891 that William Morris founded his famous Kelmscott Press, where he set out to reinvigorate the traditional printing methods of Gutenberg, Jenson, and Caxton. And it was in 1892 that worsening conditions in the handset-type business forced 23 of the largest remaining type foundries in America to consolidate into the American Type Founders Company, where Henry Lewis Bullen began collecting one of the country’s largest type-founding and printing libraries, now housed at Columbia University, in New York.1 By the late 19th century, anxieties over the loss of the old ways of printing were already crystalizing.

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The Millard Fillmore Bill was printed on a Chandler and Price New Style letterpress at the Manchester Press on warm white 90lb Stonehenge acid free paper in August of 2008. The Fillmore Bills are approximately 6.14″ x 2.61″ printed on front and signed on reverse.

26 bills have been printed on handmade, Nepalese LOKTA paper and will be carried around by Fritz Swanson and Jason Polan in their wallet for one week each. The bills will be signed, lettered, and the week of the wallet carrying will be documented by each artist. Corresponding (clean) lettered Fillmore Bill on Stonehenge will accompany your wallet Fillmore Bill.

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In the movie Good Will Hunting, the character that Matt Damon plays first gets seen by the famous MIT Math Professor while he is doing graffiti on the chalkboard in the hall but it turns out it is not graffiti but a solution to a difficult proof! (This is the second time he was solving some very difficult high level math problem secretively). I have always liked this movie and the shapes he was making in this scene, maybe because I have no idea what they are and maybe because they remind me of an Eames design. I was watching the movie while I was eating cereal but stopped when he was drawing those chalk abstract shapes and drew them on a little piece of paper. Then I thought it would be pretty neat to make an edition of this.

Fritz Swanson printed this edition by hand on a Chandler and Price New Style Letterpress at The Manchester Press. The edition is printed on Dur-O-Tone Steel Gray Paper made by the French Paper Company in Niles, Michigan. The paper has been hand cut to 5.75″ x 3.75″ . The edition was printed from a copper plate made at Owosso Graphic Art in Owosso, Michigan.

They are signed in pencil on reverse and numbered in an edition of 72.

I just looked again at the scene and realize I missed a line on the far right shape in the middle row. Do not tell anyone.